ext3 is the ext2 filesystem with journaling added. Journaling keeps track of what will be written to the disk prior to the write operation beginning. When the write is done, it is noted in the journal. If the system crashes during a write, it can recover the operation when it comes back up. This prevents incomplete writes from occurring on the disk and eliminates the need to do a filesystem check after a system crash.

AutoFS allows the system to automatically mount devices and network shares as they are requested and even unmount them again when no longer in use. The main configuration for the automounter is /etc/auto.master. Initially, this file will only contain comments, including examples for a /etc/auto.misc and /etc/auto.net.